Hacker News Reader

Comment by ehsanu1 | Hacker News Reader

The point of making the billion dollars yourself is having a say in where it gets spent, not in "giving it all away" indiscriminately. Indeed, someone else might choose to just keep their billions in the family, for the sake of obnoxious levels of luxury. I'm sure there are some billionaires exactly like that.

Anyways, the whole problem with trying to become a billionaire is that it's really a lottery. Sure, someone determined could probably earn a few million through effort alone, but becoming a billionaire requires a special mix of smarts, hard work, and luck. Mostly luck, disproportionately so. You can't just will yourself to earn billions.

View on HN

> The point of making the billion dollars yourself is having a say in where it gets spent

I doubt people that are great at creating value would appreciate making these kind of decisions once they get to know what's involved.

Just to give an example: an 8 year-old requested $50'000 from Bill and Melinda Gates foundation to help him survive by contributing to his leukemia treatment, but Gates turned the request down because they don't contribute to individual cases (their policy is to fund programs designed to target large groups of people, i.e. population control in Asia).

I don't imagine great founders or great engineers getting up in the morning because they dream in having a "point" to say in this kind of decisions. They love to do what they do best: creating something people want.

The Gates Foundation isn't your traditional "take money, give money" charity, though. It is actually just the kind of charity that you would expect a successful entrepreneur to create. They require results from the research that they fund and they require regular status from the research they fund. It is a very hands-on style that entrepreneurs are good at and other charities, traditionally, have not.

An interesting point. Is it more interesting to do the work, or to pay for the work? I'd come down on the of doing the work, though I guess if you pay for the work, you can be present for the fun bits and absent for the hard slog (the majority).

The problem with doing is that it can be hard to make end meet while doing interesting work with long term payoffs. The options I can think of are:

1) Get an interesting job.

2) Fight tooth and nail to the top of the career/academic heap in a boring job and hope you make it to a position of being able to set your own interesting work while you still have brain cells.

3) Find an angel or patron who is prepared to pay for an interesting long shot.

4) Say hang it, and do interesting work while keeping your lifestyle within the modest remuneration you can scape together.

5) Part time work, with interesting stuff making up a full time load.

Can anyone suggest other options that might work with dependents?

Start a business that generates a passive income source, in the same vein as patio's BCC. This would obviously require a large amount of work up-front, but within 10 years you should be sorted.

I was really surprised to realise that my living costs are only about $130 per week, or $20 per day. If I could earn $20 every day, I could do whatever I want in the other 23 hours.

> I'm sure there are some billionaires exactly like that.

Steve jobs?

or Yuri Milner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/31/yuri-milner-house-r...

>I'm sure there are some billionaires exactly like that.

The Rothschild family is thought to have a net worth of a few trillion or thereabouts, so yeah. Of course, they do things with it.

Wow I can't find anything at all supporting anywhere near that. The total net worth of all the worlds billionaires is only $4.5 trillion according to forbes.

Forbes only knows about public wealth. The Rothschilds in the mid 19th century owned half the wealth of the world, and the contemporary argument is that they have not lost money since then, rather it has grown steadily, and is hidden off the books in countless family controlled foundations as well as secret reserves stashed away before there was the type of public accounting we have today.

Heads of state and CEOs have public wealth. The Rothschilds didn't.

How does the total value of privately traded companies compare to publically traded companies, and how many privately traded companies can the Rothschilds plausibly own without it being public knowledge?

Is it possible to find the total market cap of all privately traded companies? Considering that a private company's wealth isn't public knowledge the only thing we can do is estimate using a tool like bizstats.com.

Macro economics can give you a pretty accurate estimate of the "market cap" of privately traded companies: just work your way down from the Gross National Product by segmenting it into public and privately earned. (You could also look at total tax revenue and calculate from there)

And the other half was owned by Russians (Czar) ?

Quite obviously outside of Rothschilds and Russians noone owned anything without even knowing it.

Y'know, I went looking for something to debunk this (rather implausible sounding) theory, so I googled "rothschild snopes". Snopes doesn't actually have anything, but I did find this rather delicious thread from the prisonplanet forums, wherein a bunch of conspiracy nuts speculate about precisely who is funding snopes:

http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=196892.0

Snopes most definitely is a disinfo website much like wikipedia

Anyway, I certainly can't find any evidence to support the contention that the Rothschilds are significantly wealthier than the wealthiest known people, and I don't believe it's possible to have a trillion dollars in assets while flying underneath the radar.

Why is it implausible that money doesn't just vanish over time?

I have no idea how much money they have but I don't see why it would have declined. They have always been shrewd investors.

Families grow exponentially. It's possible that over the years it was spread out to the dozens of great great great grandchildren who are probably so far from the core family, that they don't act as a unified group any more.

The Rothschilds had a tradition of the majority of the family fortune going to the first born male, and the others only received, as they say in the Godfather, "a living".

Without any data to support this, I'm going to go ahead and file this in the illuminati-esque, conspiracy theory column.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com